The Memoirs of Lætitia Pilkington give a wonderful glimpse into several
worlds of the 18th Century – respectable Dublin, into which she was
born the daughter of an eminent doctor; Dr. Swift and his circle, in which she
moved until the failure of her marriage; Grub Street and the demimonde of
London where she was afterwards forced to scrape a living. She was friend and
confidante of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, and Colley Cibber. Sometime
she hob-nobbed with Dukes, sometimes she was in a debtor's prison. Throughout
it all she kept her courage, her wit, and her remarkable memory for the telling
anecdote, which she drew on for her memoirs. Though they were written
principally to make money, both through sales and through blackmail, she hoped

That I, like the classics, shall be read
When time, and all the world are dead.

They have long been
drawn on by biographers of Dr. Swift, but fell into neglect during the
Victorian era, which no doubt found her altogether unsuitable for respectable
readers. There have been a few to admire her, though: Virginia Woolf began her
appreciation

Can you imagine a very
extraordinary cross between Moll Flanders and
Lady Ritchie, between a rolling and rollicking woman of the town and a lady of
breeding and refinement? Lætitia Pilkington (1712-1759) was something of the
sort, shady, shifty, adventurous, and yet, like Thackeray's daughter, like Miss
Mitford, like Madame de Sévigné and Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, so imbued
with the old traditions of her sex that she wrote, as ladies talk, to give
pleasure. Throughout her Memoirs, we can never forget that it is her wish to
entertain, her unhappy fate to sob.

More recently, interest has been re-awakened by a (very expensive, and
now out of print) edition in 1997, and Norma Clarke's recent biography Queen of the Wits. Here she is in her
own words; and if it is not all literally true, then it certainly should be.